My dog’s ears are all over the place. They flop over his head in a haphazard semaphore. It’s hard to imagine how they could serve any practical purpose. My dog’s ears are a dog’s breakfast. Yet sometimes, at unexpected moments, they prick up and turn in rare symmetry towards something: something unknown and unknowable to me, beyond my ken.

It’s summer, the season of sounds: thunderstorms; insects; birdsong; people laughing and talking on the other side of the back fence. It’s the season when after dark all the doors and windows are open and every sound from up and down the street becomes public. On summer nights I find my attention caught without warning by the click of white-striped freetail bats: they fly high and fast and their calls are like a slow telegram, tick, tick, tick, or the wickering of electricity in the cables above the train line as a train approaches from the next station around the bend.